Collaborating with Aliens

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

UFO behind Delphi

Alun Salt / Flickr

The Treas­ury of the Atheni­ans at Delphi. Noth­ing to see here.

I’ve been kick­ing around an idea for a paper for a couple of years. Every so often Stephen Hawk­ing will announce that con­tact with an extra-terrestrial civil­isa­tion would be a Very Bad Thing. There­fore silence, or as close to it as pos­sible is a good idea. It’s not just Stephen Hawk­ing, many other people agree. Hawk­ing makes the point that con­tact from Europe to other regions hasn’t gone well for the nat­ives since 1492. I think this is a bet­ter argu­ment than “Ali­ens are scary”, but I think he’s using the wrong ana­logy. There is room for a paper that takes another view. There’s a couple of reas­ons I haven’t pushed on with it.

The main reason is that I’ve not been clear about where the paper could be pub­lished. Ok, Hawk­ing hasn’t pub­lished his belief as a paper either, but he’s a fam­ous phys­i­cist. Fam­ous phys­i­cists are pre­sumed not only to be experts on Phys­ics, but all sci­ences, pseudos­ciences, etc. I can’t claim this expert­ise. If I’m going to say any­thing mean­ing­ful I should at least have it scru­tin­ised. This is the second prob­lem. It would be weird if my pos­i­tion were unequi­voc­ally cor­rect, par­tic­u­larly as we have no data at all on extra-terrestrial con­tact — unless you con­sider the Mars nano-bacteria that were announced and then dis­missed as a trial run. I could rely on review­ers to pick up obvi­ous errors or blind spots, but there’s surely a bet­ter way to fix prob­lems before sub­mit­ting to a journal with some collaboration.

I am part of a group of people who were apply­ing to have a blog hos­ted some­where. I think that’s very likely to not hap­pen. I’ve been quiet here, partly because of a broken arm and partly with a pile up of work that I need to sort through because it’s been delayed by my arm. It’s a shame because the site has a big audi­ence, but maybe not too big a shame as this site has a qual­ity audi­ence. What I’m inter­ested in now is if a col­lab­or­at­ive or even massively col­lab­or­at­ive paper could be writ­ten and how could it work.

Before even dis­cuss­ing tools there’s an issue over dir­ec­tion. As I said at the start, I think Stephen Hawk­ing is wrong. You might think he’s right. He may even be right even if the method he got there was wrong. One of the inspir­a­tions for this approach is Timothy Gowers’ col­lab­or­at­ive approach to solv­ing math­em­at­ical prob­lems. He pulled together a group of people to tackle a prob­lem for a couple of years that he alone could not solve. The prob­lem was solved in seven weeks by a method that came as a sur­prise to him. I can see how that can demon­strably work. In the case of this paper, the sample is zero, and the res­ult is (expec­ted to be) a counter-opinion. Without a real­ity check is it pos­sible to write such a paper with open collaboration?

Alan Cann has used another method. He put up a paper for open peer review. I think it was a clever idea and I could do the same. My worry here is that some of the ana­lo­gies will be out­side my period and I think there could be very good and insight­ful com­ments from people who say, “No, you’ve got this wrong. You should be look­ing at…” In my opin­ion this makes the paper bet­ter and it’s worth author credit. If you give the per­son credit then to an extent you tor­pedo the claim that the paper is pre-reviewed because to some extent it’s self-reviewed.

I’m try­ing to think of a work­able solu­tion, and you’re wel­come to tell me I’m wrong about this too.

I think I should put up the first draft of the paper, prob­ably on Google Docs. I prefer Dok­uWiki, but leav­ing it open for com­ments and edit­ing could leave it wrecked. For the people who leave sub­stan­tial com­ments which can be pos­it­ive or neg­at­ive, but also indic­ate a dir­ec­tion to go for­ward with the paper, I offer co-authorship. I close the paper from pub­lic view and we write and re-write until it’s ready to go to a journal that’s either OA or happy to have an arXiv pre-print up. The gamble here is that enough people will see the call to review the first draft that it gen­er­ates a sens­ible amount of feed­back to improve it.

Ideally, I’d like to have a sys­tem that can re-used so that I can use it for gen­eral his­tory or archae­ology papers as well as odd ones like this. The reason for choos­ing this topic as the test sub­ject is that it’s doesn’t mat­ter that much to me if it gets massively delayed and it will very neatly high­light some areas where I am emphat­ic­ally not an expert and that col­lab­or­a­tion could be useful.

If your Stonehenge theory is nonsense, is mine rational because it’s not yours?

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 25 Comments , ,

Revellers at the solstice in Stonehenge

Sound at Stonehenge

I’m cur­rently work­ing with a group of blog­gers on a site to be launched some­where in the next few months. I’m not sure where yet. One of the fea­tures of the site is an informal rule that we won’t com­ment on news till at least seven days have passed from mak­ing the head­lines. There’s a couple of reas­ons for this.

We’re all busy. Chas­ing the news is work and takes time. If we get stopped before we can fin­ish it could be a while before we pick up the story again. In the mean­time hot news has become old cold news and the key points have already been said a dozen times by every­one else. The post gets spiked and the time is wasted. Inten­tion­ally plan­ning for a longer cycle changes how you approach a story and gives you not just the story to ana­lyse but also the reac­tion too. In the case of the Stone­henge acous­tics story the reac­tion is more inter­est­ing than the base story itself.

As a reminder Stephen Waller presen­ted a talk at a meet­ing of Amer­ican Asso­ci­ation for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence in Van­couver. In it he pro­posed that the design of Stone­henge was related to aud­it­ory inter­fer­ence pat­terns between the sound of two flutes being played. Andy Burnham points out the obvi­ous prob­lem in his com­ment.

“Waller rigged two flutes to an air pump so they played the same note con­tinu­ously” OK, fine, so how on earth is this rel­ev­ant to the prac­tic­al­it­ies of an ancient soci­ety? In order to get strong, static can­cel­la­tions in the sound you would need equal and unvary­ing sound pres­sure levels from each instru­ment, and for the sources to be from the same two points in space. How pre­cisely would two flute play­ers do this in prac­tice without an air pump? ie hav­ing to take breaths and carry on this trick for any length of time. This is utter nonsense.

Andy Burnham is pretty much gold in this thread. In reac­tion to the idea this sound could be achieved by cir­cu­lar breath­ing, he also adds:

I don’t thin cir­cu­lar breath­ing is the answer — it’s pretty dif­fi­cult on low res­ist­ance wind instru­ments such as the flute. Didgeri­doos and such­like won’t exhibit this effect — you need a high fre­quency pure tone — as close to a sine wave as pos­sible — ie a flute. Bag­pipes wouldn’t work either, unless someone inven­ted some sort of ‘flute bag­pipes’. A reedy bag­pipe sound is rich in har­mon­ics. The har­monic fre­quen­cies from the two instru­ments won’t cre­ate stand­ing wave can­cel­la­tions in the same places in space as the fun­da­mental tones, so you won’t get same strong can­cel­la­tion effect. And as I said you also need two fixed amp­litudes and closely fixed point sources for the effect to work.

Sound is a dif­fi­cult sub­ject for archae­olo­gists. Flutes or pipes seem likely, as to drums, but the closest pre­his­toric musical instru­ments, that I know archae­olo­gists have found, are lurs from Den­mark. These date to around the 8th cen­tury BC and sur­vived because they were bronze, not organic mater­ial like wood or bone. You can see them in the logo for Lurpak but­ter. It’s been a while since I’ve read about this, so I’d be sur­prised if there weren’t now some­thing older known. There are a couple of can­did­ates for bone flutes that are older, this is the most prom­ising arte­fact, but I don’t know how widely accep­ted they are yet.

Even though there’s scant evid­ence for music in the Neo­lithic and Bronze Age Brit­ish Isles, it’s an odd leap to say it didn’t exist. Music in some form seems to be a con­stant in human soci­ety, so this is where a min­im­al­ist approach breaks down. But it’s not just musical instru­ments that are miss­ing. I sus­pect a lot of Stone­henge is miss­ing too.
Bits of it have broken off and it’s easy to spot where stones were miss­ing but refilling these gaps, as many recon­struc­tions do, doesn’t go far enough for me. The stones are the skel­eton of Stone­henge. We don’t know if they were the whole body. We do know that the skel­eton was a lot of work. The hard sar­sen stones are craf­ted like wood, with tenon and mor­tice joints. Archae­olo­gists cur­rently believe that the blue­stones were trans­por­ted from far Wales. In light of this what else would have been at a liv­ing Stonehenge?

If you visit places of wor­ship in mod­ern times, there’s a bit more than stone. There’s wooden seats, often dec­or­ated rather than plain. The walls are painted, win­dows often dec­or­ated. It’s not unusual to find holy books n plush vel­vet cush­ions and tex­tiles dyed in strik­ing col­ours draw­ing the eye here and there. We also know tex­tiles were used in Neo­lithic and Bronze Age times. So after the thou­sands of man-hours shap­ing the stones, how likely is it that Gareth turned to Shane and said: “That’s that done. No point in wast­ing time dec­or­at­ing it with tartans or drapes. That’ll just be tedi­ous and gaudy.”?

Once you add tex­tiles into Stone­henge the acous­tic and visual prop­er­ties change. There are many argu­ments that “If you look out of this gap you can see this star,” but you can’t if Blodwyn’s nifty eth­nic rug is in the way. As sci­ent­ists archae­olo­gists need a min­im­al­ist model of Stone­henge as a found­a­tion to build on, but this min­im­al­ist model is an unfin­ished work. It’s a tool to build an idea of what Stone­henge looked like on. If you’re going to say that it’s the fin­ished model and we don’t need tex­tiles, then all recon­struc­tions should show any­one there naked because there’s no evid­ence for the clothes people wore there either.

As Andy Burnham poin­ted out, Steven Waller’s approach misses the prac­tical use of Stone­henge by ancient peoples, and in this case adding people into the past makes Waller’s pro­posal either unwork­able or an aston­ish­ing Jenga tower of spe­cial plead­ing. It’s safe to say I’m uncon­vinced, but I’ve not been too impressed with some of the reac­tions to the story either. “Crank’ seemed a com­mon opin­ion, If Steven Waller were a crank then by present­ing his work at a sci­entific con­fer­ence he’s still closer to pro­fes­sional prac­tice than archae­olo­gists who issue a press release now before a talk in a few months time.

In fact a browse of his web­site shows he’s not likely to be a crank, just ter­ribly unaware of the dif­fer­ences in approach between US and UK prehistory.

The bulk of his work is on rock art at Amer­ican pet­ro­glyph sites. The acous­tics of rock art in the US is a new field, but pro­du­cing some inter­est­ing res­ults. Some archae­olo­gists are find­ing archae­oacous­tics much more intriguing than, to pick a ran­dom example, archae­oastro­nomy. But Amer­ican pre­his­tory is dif­fer­ent to Brit­ish pre­his­tory. They have a richer rock art record, espe­cially in the south­w­est. They also have eth­no­graphic records and research that can help con­nect mean­ing to sym­bols. It’s not per­fect, and I’d like to debunk one inter­pret­a­tion of a site this sum­mer, but it’s very very dif­fer­ent to the lim­ited things we can say about rock art here. It means that Waller’s Amer­ican work can rely on cul­tural inform­a­tion that we simply don’t have here. What is accep­ted by US archae­olo­gists about US sites is extremely spec­u­lat­ive when applied to UK sites.

Very few people have com­men­ted on work around archae­oacous­tics in gen­eral in rela­tion to this story. A few com­menters have men­tioned Deveraux’s work, but mainly the thrust has been this story must be debunked. I don’t think for a moment archae­olo­gists have con­sciously decided the out­sider must be expelled, but I won­der if an eager­ness to por­tray this as non­sense indic­ates some­thing more. Sub­con­sciously does reject­ing Waller as non­sense and the oppos­ite of what you do men­tally reaf­firm that your own the­or­ies must there­fore by default be sound reasoning?

For some­thing more pos­it­ive about how sound can be explored in archae­ology, Alan Boyle has writ­ten an inter­est­ing piece on MSNBC’s Cos­mic Log.

Teaching with Social Media

Alun Digital Academia, Science No Comments , ,

Road building in Nepal

Road build­ing on the Annapurna cir­cuit, Nepal, surely a path to enlight­en­ment? Photo by rpb1001.

I think I took my PhD at Leicester at almost exactly the right time — if you ignore the cata­strophic down­turn in edu­ca­tion fund­ing. The reason is I’ve had the oppor­tun­ity to work with a few people who have been inspir­ingly innov­at­ive in their teach­ing. Derek Raine intro­duced me to Problem-Based Learn­ing, when he built a new degree in Inter­dis­cip­lin­ary Sci­ence around it. +A.J. Cann also help by let­ting me help out on some of his numer­acy / study skills courses for Bio­lo­gical Sci­ences and that’s what he’s blog­ging about today at Of Schemes and Memes and on his own blog at Sci­ence of the Invis­ible.

I’m sure I’ve had plenty of study skills train­ing but I don’t remem­ber much of it. At its worst it was a part of the first year course teach­ing how to use vari­ous sys­tems I might want to use in the third year. By which time the sys­tem might well have changed or else I would have for­got­ten it through lack of use. I don’t do well if I have do some­thing in order to learn how to use a sys­tem. I work bet­ter if I learn how to use a sys­tem in order to do some­thing else.

Alan Cann has a focus on how and why stu­dents want to learn some­thing. To explain the dif­fer­ence, when I was taught I might be shown how to use PubMed. Fill in all the boxes and that’s a pass. In con­trast Alan sets tasks that have a pur­pose and explains PubMed or Web of Know­ledge are the easi­est ways to get the inform­a­tion stu­dents need. The cleverest part is that this is wrapped up with social media icing.

Get­ting cohorts onto Google+ gets them think­ing about pri­vacy, but also makes com­mu­nic­a­tion online a more nat­ural act. Stu­dents can build their own sup­port struc­tures. These become more import­ant as the stu­dents move toward inde­pend­ent study later in their degree. Another clever thing work­ing through social media does is it helps dis­solve bar­ri­ers between modules.

In my first degree what I learned in mod­ule A applied to mod­ule A. What I learned in Mod­ule B applied to Mod­ule B. I wasn’t mak­ing con­nec­tions between the two. On Google+ the work their is for Alan’s mod­ule, but stu­dents dis­cuss more than that. They’ll talk about other mod­ules and make con­nec­tions about why some­thing puzz­ling is hap­pen­ing because we know from this mod­ule that this occurs so when you apply it to that lab exper­i­ment you should expect that and so on.

Another fea­ture is that Alan doesn’t give the same course twice. He’ll drop what thinks doesn’t work and come up with some­thing bet­ter. This shouldn’t be rad­ical. I’ve been on count­less courses as a post-grad that talk about the import­ance of reflec­tion in teach­ing. Usu­ally this reflec­tion in the sense of “how can you bet­ter guide stu­dents along the path to enlight­en­ment?” Alan and Derek have both taken the approach that ques­tions if the path is right in the first place. Even if it’s basic­ally sound, do we need all these wig­gly detours to des­tin­a­tions no one vis­its anymore?

This post is a good entry point to some of what Alan is doing with teach­ing. Sci­ence of the Invis­ible is the place to go if you want to read more.

Photo: Road build­ing on the Annapurna cir­cuit, Nepal by rpb1001. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC licence.

This post also appears on Google+.

Thony Christie on Hevelius

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , ,

If you have any interest in the his­tory of astro­nomy you should be fol­low­ing The Renais­sance Math­em­aticus blog and this post, The last great naked eye astro­nomer, is a per­fect example of why. This is a post about Johannes Hev­elius who has to be one of the most fam­ous unheard of astro­nomers ever.

That doesn’t make sense I know. There are a lot of people who haven’t heard of Hev­elius, but if you have heard of Hev­elius, then the idea that people haven’t heard of him seems non­sense because his work is every­where in astronomy.

Scutum constellation in the Uranographia

Scu­tum in the Urano­graphia by Hev­elius. Source: Wikipedia.

Everyone’s happy that most con­stel­la­tions are ancient, but what is less well-known is that not every star was in a con­stel­la­tion. There were gaps between con­stel­la­tions filled with faint and bor­ing stars. These were called αμορφοι amorphoi or unformed stars by the Greeks. This is no good if you want to do sci­ence, because things like comets don’t stick to the inter­est­ing parts of the sky. That’s why map­ping was so import­ant in the Renais­sance. In the case of Hev­elius, his maps were so use­ful that he formed seven con­stel­la­tions that stay with us to this day.

I’ll admit con­stel­la­tions like Lacerta or Vulpec­ula aren’t fam­ous con­stel­la­tions, but he was work­ing with the haps between con­stel­la­tions. The fact that his charts were made of con­stel­la­tions vis­ible in Europe shows he was work­ing in a highly com­pet­it­ive space.

It’s easy to take this kind of work for gran­ted. The out­put can be seen as an uncon­tested fact, but Thony’s post put’s Hevelius’s work into the con­text of its time includ­ing the often intense sci­entific rivalry between astro­nomer defend­ing per­sonal and national status.

The also shows that while with hind­sight it seems obvi­ous that tele­scopes would bring more accur­ate meas­ure­ments, at any given time in his­tory it’s not always obvi­ous that new tech­no­logy is The Next Big Thing, it could be a dis­trac­tion or Expens­ive Dead End.

One small slip for man, one giant mistake for space heritage?

Alun Politics, Science, The Past No Comments

There’s a check­list from the Apollo XIII mis­sion owned(?) by Jim Lov­ell. It’s an inter­est­ing puzzle from an astro-heritage point of view and some­thing I’ve not given any thought to at all. In fact there’s two puzzles. One is legal own­er­ship and the other is what her­it­age value does it have and neither ques­tion is con­nec­ted much. The only con­nec­tion I see is that if there is no her­it­age value then people won’t get worked up too much about the ownership.

Jim Lovell reading a newspaper story about the Apollo 13 mission

Jim Lov­ell dis­cov­ers he got back to Earth safely thanks to the Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin. Photo: NASA.

I get the impres­sion NASA would have been within their rights to claim own­er­ship, but if they allowed astro­nauts to keep memen­tos, then that’s their mis­take. I’m sur­prised that a check­list with cru­cial cal­cu­la­tions was dis­carded from a failed mis­sion, but I don’t know the exact cir­cum­stances of how Jim Lov­ell got to keep it, but it seems NASA wasn’t that her­it­age aware at the time.

At the same time I don’t know what her­it­age value it has. Her­it­age value isn’t the same as his­tor­ical or archae­olo­gical value. While the cal­cu­la­tions are his­tor­ic­ally import­ant, is the paper that holds them neces­sary to under­stand the his­tory of the trip?

What I can see is that there’s a big emo­tional hit with the arte­fact. See­ing the authen­tic arte­fact puts you vicari­ously in a pos­i­tion of being in deep trouble in deep space. The emo­tional value is noth­ing to be sneered at. It’s part of being human and it’s going to play a part in dis­cus­sions whether you dir­ectly address it or not. A sens­ible con­clu­sion is going to have to deal with the emo­tional and exper­i­en­tial side of the checklist.

For those who think the answer is obvi­ous, this is tax-payer fun­ded mater­ial there­fore the tax-payer owns it, here’s another puzzle. Sup­pose an Apollo astro­naut gets paid to endorse Moon Juice a new fizzy sugar-laden drink. The only reason he is get­ting the job is because tax-payers fun­ded him to go to the moon. Does that mean that the tax-payers should get the fee and not the astro­naut? It’s not an exact ana­logy, this is a mater­ial arte­fact. Yet if it’s an arte­fact that was going to be dis­carded by NASA it wrong for an astro­naut to own it, or is it a bet­ter solu­tion that nobody owns it? Should Mitchell’s cam­era have been left on the Moon where no one could access it?

I don’t see an obvi­ous answer that sat­is­fies every­one. Another good piece by +Amy Shira Teitel.

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

Cervix watching

Alun Life, Science No Comments ,

Emily Bald­win @astroemz on Twit­ter is going in for a loop excision next week to remove pre-cancerous cells from her cer­vix. As she says it’s a routine oper­a­tion, but it’s only routine for the pro­fes­sion­als. It’s not routine for her so she is under­stand­ably nervous. She’s blog­ging on what hap­pens to help raise aware­ness of the import­ance of cer­vical smears under the twit­ter hashtag #cer­vix­watch.

I think this is one of those situ­ations where put­ting thoughts into writ­ing can help. I had a routine oper­a­tion to remove a kind of can­cer that Emily will never get, and some­times it’s wor­ry­ing. The raw stat­ist­ics are that almost every­one has no trouble, so you can feel silly for being anxious. Still, I woke up one night in a small puddle of my own blood I was a bit con­cerned. After think­ing about how to write this up I real­ised I’d be even more wor­ried if I’d woken up in a puddle of someone else’s blood. This kind of detach­ment made it easier to cope with waiting.

It’s easier to be detached when some­thing is over too. I think put­ting inform­a­tion online before the out­come is known is brave. It’s a per­sonal exper­i­ence and con­fess­ing fears can make you feel more vul­ner­able. I don’t ima­gine it’s a huge help that the cells might be pre-cancerous, mean­ing it’s not actu­ally can­cer. The c-word is still there but because it’s pre– you could feel fool­ish for wor­ry­ing about it. Oddly I’m told it’s a com­mon thing among can­cer patients to feel guilty because you know other people have had it worse. In Emily’s blog I see some­thing sim­ilar. She doesn’t want to over­play the situ­ation, but she’s still per­fectly entitled to be anxious and some of her post explains why.

In my case other people def­in­itely have had it worse than me. The sad­dest memory I have is from the wait­ing room when I had chemo­ther­apy. There weren’t enough seats, so the polite thing to do was to stand and let the people with can­cer sit down. There were a lot of people there in a much worse way than me and they didn’t all have can­cer. I felt tired in my muscles all the time, like I’d been swim­ming all day, but I wasn’t as run down as some of the carers, so I stood up to give one of them a seat. It was heart­break­ing to see how shattered they were look­ing after someone they loved. Many of them were clearly in dire need of a rest, and for some of them it was never going to get any better.

Com­pared to that a bit of embar­rass­ment and worry is a bar­gain. If you’re female and you’re squeam­ish at the thought of smear tests or think you really shouldn’t make a fuss about some­thing like that, then you should fol­low Emily’s blog over the next few weeks to see if it’s really worth risk­ing dying of embarrassment.

…and as a follow-up she now has her exper­i­ence online.

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

Can you preserve sites on the Moon?

Alun Politics, Science No Comments , , ,

This might sound like it’s either mad, who’s going to dam­age sites on the moon? or bleed­ing obvi­ous, if we could still see Columbus’s first foot­print on His­pa­ni­ola we’d pre­serve it, right?

Boot print in the lunar regolith

Boot print in the lunar rego­lith. Photo: NASA / Buzz Aldrin

As the NYT points out, the Google X Prize is aimed at mak­ing the Moon more access­ible and that will have knock-on effects when it comes to pre­serving his­toric sites on the lunar sur­face. No-one’s going to inten­tional dam­age Neil Armstrong’s foot­print are they? Well once tour­ists arrive it’s inev­it­able I think. There’s some hom­inin foot­prints at Laetoli. They’re among the earli­est foot­prints of our human-like ancest­ors. And they’re now pro­tec­ted because of dam­age. Tour­ists couldn’t res­ist put­ting their foot into the foot­print to compare.

List­ing the Moon land­ings as her­it­age sites might seem obvi­ous, but it’s also cur­rently impossible. You can only list sites on your ter­rit­ory. Through vari­ous treat­ies the Moon (and Ant­arc­tica) aren’t recog­nised as national ter­rit­or­ies, so they can’t have her­it­age list­ings. The USA can claim own­er­ship of any­thing they’ve left on the moon, but not of the dust on its surface.

So long as humans can’t get back to the moon it might still look like navel-gazing, but one of the things that’s mak­ing space archae­ology an inter­est­ing field is that a few archae­olo­gists are now look­ing back at how unpro­tec­ted key sites from the space race are on Earth. KSC, Kourou and Baikonur are all still in use, but Woomera is no longer used by the Brit­ish. The Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment has used it as site for hold­ing immigrants.

Once you start look­ing at earth­side sites things get messier because they have human con­sequences. Alice Gor­man has noted Peenemünde is a key site in the devel­op­ment of rock­etry, but list­ing it as a her­it­age site can’t be done without think­ing about deaths among the Jew­ish work­ers there, or those killed at the Brit­ish tar­gets. She’s also poin­ted out that some other sites chosen because they were remote and no one lived there, turned out to have indi­gen­ous peoples who thought their homes were very local to where they lived.

For more on Space Archae­ology
Beth O’Leary has a site on Lunar Legacies at http://spacegrant.nmsu.edu/lunarlegacies/
Alice Gor­man has a web­log Space Age Archae­ology at http://zoharesque.blogspot.com/
and there’s a Space Archae­ology Wiki at http://www.spacearchaeology.org/wiki/

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

Psychic Readings are True

Alun Science 1 Comment , , , ,

Yes, it’s a delib­er­ately sceptic-baiting title. The plan is: it winds people up, they point out how I’m wrong and I learn something.

Psychic advert

I fore­see you are about to lose some money. Photo by Timothy Krause.

I’ve not com­pletely mad though. Obvi­ously not all psychic read­ings are true. It would take an enorm­ous tal­ent to ignore real­ity that has shown many read­ings to be false or fraud­u­lent. If I could do that I’d have a golden future in polit­ics. No, I’m only arguing the true ones are true.

Even that sounds odd. By defin­i­tion the true read­ings are true. Isn’t it a bit dif­fi­cult to believe that any read­ings are true if, like me, you don’t believe in psychic powers? Surely that’s going to need a weaselly approach to ‘truth’? I prefer to say simple, but you can call weasel in the com­ment box below if you like.

The idea has been form­ing since I went on an Applied Cold Read­ing course. Applied Cold Read­ing works best if you can get things wrong, but some­times it hap­pens that you fail to get things wrong.* String a few of these fails together and your sub­ject is stunned by how much you got right. Now you and I know that we were aim­ing for misses, but to your sub­ject that doesn’t mat­ter. You were right. That’s what she knows. The fact that you were right by acci­dent or chance is irrel­ev­ant. You were right.

And now you’re in trouble because she’ll expect you to keep being right. But that’s your prob­lem.
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How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

I’ve known about this book for a while, but the title put me off read­ing it. It sounds too smug to me, and while there are reas­ons for reclas­si­fy­ing Pluto I don’t think it’s some­thing astro­nomers could be smug about. Planet was not a term inven­ted by astro­nomers, it came from pop­u­lar cul­ture in the ancient world. I’m also wary of how use­ful a rigid defin­i­tion of planet is. The ter­restrial plan­ets are clearly not like the Gas Giants, and per­haps you could even dis­tin­guish between Gas Giants and Ice Giants. The defin­i­tion for dwarf planet is ter­rible, and how can a dwarf planet not be a planet. Finally Mike Brown dis­covered Xena, which he argued could be the tenth planet, but I can recall there were a rash of plan­ets dis­covered. Wasn’t Sedna sup­posed to be big­ger than Pluto too? Then there was Eris and Dyno­mia too. So I wasn’t expect­ing to read much bey­ond the first chapter.

So first up, I still think it’s a bad title. Not because it’s smug, but because the book is the oppos­ite. It’s warm, endear­ing and very human. The author is also extremely well-placed to write the book because there was indeed a rash of plan­ets dis­covered, and he was the guy who assembled the team respons­ible for them, includ­ing Quaoar, Sedna, Xena and the moon Gab­ri­elle which are now offi­cially named Eris and Dys­no­mia. Basic­ally if it’s a dis­tant body in the solar sys­tem that I’ve heard of, it’s likely that Mike Brown dis­covered it.

This could have so eas­ily been a book purely about number-crunching, pro­gram­ming and extremely faint dots on pho­to­graphic slides. He’s also included a lot about his fam­ily life, espe­cially the birth of his daugh­ter. A quick skim of the reviews on Amazon show that some people hate this. They have an opin­ion that Sci­ence is pure logic devoid of emo­tion. I blame Spock. In con­trast I think it’s very import­ant. It shows how sci­ence is a human activ­ity. The removal of Pluto from the plan­ets wasn’t done in isol­a­tion, it was part of a very human desire to explore.

The import­ance of humanity’s rela­tion­ship to plan­ets comes through very early. More or less straight away he points out that people recog­nised plan­ets long before they had pro­fes­sional astro­nomers. He also notices that there’s very little evid­ence of plan­et­shock the first time a planet was dis­covered since ancient times. If you’d asked me before I read this book I would have said it was Uranus that was the first planet dis­covered since antiquity in 1781. I would have been wrong.

Though plan­ets were so deeply embed­ded into many aspects of every­day life, there is no record­ing of the pub­lic reac­tion to the first and most sig­ni­fic­ant shock to the word planet. In the six­teenth cen­tury the idea began to spread that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the cen­ter of the uni­verse and that the earth and the plan­ets revolved around it. Sud­denly, the wan­der­ers were in dis­ar­ray. Instead of the sun and the moon and the other plan­ets revolving around the earth, five of them (the plan­ets) went around one of them (the sun), while the sev­enth (the moon) went around the earth. The earth, like five of the wan­der­ers, also went around the sun.

Once you have a helio­centric sys­tem Earth has to be a planet. I’m kick­ing myself for not real­ising that. With hind­sight it’s obvi­ous, though you can see why the dis­cov­ery of Earth as a planet wasn’t a big trauma in itself. He also tackles the minor plan­ets like Ceres and Pal­las and their quiet demo­tion into asteroids.

None of this is done with a sense of “how stu­pid people were for not know­ing this”. Instead I get a sense that Mike Brown believes that people were using the word planet in a way that was use­ful to them at the time. Like­wise with more recent astro­nomers he’s happy to give credit to their work. Where he has been able to go fur­ther he’s acknow­ledged that he has had the bene­fit of liv­ing at a time with tech­niques like com­puter ana­lysis that weren’t avail­able to earlier astro­nomers. At one point he argues that Clyde Tombaugh could have seen Eris, were it not for Eris being at the far point of its orbit.

He also tackles the con­tro­versy over the dis­cov­ery of Haumea. At the time I got the vague impres­sion that a slow team of astro­nomers had missed a planet in their data and, when it was pub­licly released, another team ana­lysed the data and found it. Neither side of the dis­pute claim that’s what happened, so I was utterly wrong there. Mike Brown explains why he delayed announ­cing the dis­cov­ery of Haumea. At the top of the post I said Sedna was big­ger than Pluto. It isn’t. Its much more shiny, and that’s why it was thought to be big­ger. Mike Brown’s team were tak­ing nine months from dis­cov­ery to pub­lic­a­tion and it was when the code­name for the planet was released that it was dis­cov­er­able in a Google search on some tele­scope logs. This also explains why Xena was rush announced and partly my con­fu­sion over exactly what was and was not discovered.

The book closes with the vote in Prague to say there are eight plan­ets in the solar sys­tem. From what I heard of the meet­ing the event was chaotic, so he does an excel­lent job find­ing a nar­rat­ive to fol­low. It also explains the awful ‘dwarf planet’ term. The first vote was to demote Pluto to a ‘dwarf planet’ which is not a planet. It makes no sense until he then says there was an amend­ment to call the 8 plan­ets ‘clas­sical plan­ets’, which is another awful term. If that second vote had passed then Pluto would have been smuggled back as a planet. So the reason we have ‘dwarf plan­ets’ that are not plan­ets is a botched job at a compromise.

He also argues that the defin­i­tion of a planet itself doesn’t mat­ter that much. The defin­i­tion, he argues, isn’t about what is a planet, more an explan­a­tion of why Pluto isn’t a planet — even if it’s a bad explan­a­tion. Instead he argues that con­cepts are more import­ant rather than defin­i­tions that wan­nabe law­yers can wrestle with.

The lan­guage is access­ible. You’re not going to be able to dis­cover your own planet after read­ing this book, but you’ll have a bet­ter impres­sion of what life is like when research­ing. For example there’s this:

Look­ing at vastly more sky than any­one else had ever looked at for large objects out in the Kuiper belt was so immensely excit­ing that I could hardly con­tain myself. I knew that there would be big dis­cov­er­ies, and hav­ing new pic­tures come in night after night after night with only a break for the full moon kept everything at a con­stant peak. I talked to my friends about new plan­ets. I thought about names for new plan­ets. I gave lec­tures about the pos­sib­il­ity of new plan­ets. I did everything I could, except find new planets.

I think that fail­ure to make any pro­gress on what you’re sure is an excit­ing pro­ject is famil­iar to most researchers.

With the IAU’s poor hand­ling of Pluto, it’s easy to see how this could have been a dread­ful book. I still think the title is going to put a lot of people off. Is it really going to appeal to Pluto­philes? That’s a shame because inside the cov­ers is one of the most like­able books I’ve read for a long while. It’s def­in­itely worth a read when the paper­back comes out.

You can read some of the book in excerpts at Mike Brown’s blog.

My God, it’s full of stars!

Alun Life, Science No Comments ,

I saw a shoot­ing star last night as it streaked across a sky full of stars. I kid you not! You could look up and see thou­sands of stars. Now, astro­nomy mavens might not be too impressed by that. Many people can see stars as dim as mag­nitude six in a dark sky, lucky people can see dim­mer stars. There accounts for around 6000 vis­ible naked-eye stars. But for many of us that’s simply not true.

I used to live in a sub­urb of Derby. When I moved to Powys I noticed there were more stars in the sky. A lot more. So many I was temp­ted to buy a tele­scope. The next 30 days were clouded out, so that killed that idea, but on the days when stars are vis­ible they’re stun­ningly impress­ive. There is a way to quantify how impress­ive the night sky is that you can help with next year.

Orion in the night sky

Orion, the Hunter by Eduardo Mariño.

When I was in Derby I took part in GLOBE at Night. It’s a sur­vey that asks you to describe what you can see. The ver­sion I took part in asked people to say which stars they could see in Orion, the image on the right. It’s a good choice because the belt makes it easy to identify. I could see those. I could also see Betelguese (top-left), Bel­lat­rix (top-right) and Rigel (bottom-right). If I squin­ted and stared hard I could ima­gine I could see Saiph (bottom-left), but really I couldn’t. There was a sodium glow of dank yel­low reach­ing up into the sky like lurid phlegm-coloured fog. It was the first time I’d real­ised how bad the local light pol­lu­tion was. In con­trast, I can’t account for every star in the photo shown, partly because as your eye dark-adapts you see more stars. How­ever, this image is a very good impres­sion of what I saw. I had no trouble at all see­ing Orion’s belt. It didn’t look like a fig­ure of gems on a vel­vet back­ground. Instead the major stars looked like gems over a back­ground where someone had sneezed dia­mond dust.

It’s pos­sible this long-term cold I’ve had since Septem­ber is affect­ing me more than I think.

The dif­fer­ence isn’t just in quant­ity. A dark sky makes a big dif­fer­ence to the qual­ity of the sky. I thought I knew my way around the night sky pretty well. Last night I could see Orion out of my win­dow, but took a little while to find Taurus. Again, a good ama­teur astro­nomer might find this funny. Taurus should be unmiss­able. Even more so when you have a dark sky, mak­ing the stars even easier to see. In the North­ern hemi­sphere you look a little way to the right and you’ll see the horns of Taurus the bull live a V shape. Alde­baran sits at the top of one of the horns. This V is made of bright stars, it’s the most vis­ible part of the con­stel­la­tion, it is strik­ing. But when you have a prop­erly dark sky it’s strik­ing among a whole load of other stars. In Derby Taurus was to the right of Orion. In Powys it still is, but this time there’s an awful lot of stars in between them. It’s easier to find your when around the night sky when you can only see the prom­in­ent stars. Here, it’s almost like the sky has developed a glit­ter­ing inter­fer­ence pattern.

I know that light pol­lu­tion has been a topic of pain for astro­nomers for dec­ades. In my head I can fully under­stand it as a quant­it­ive argu­ment. Dark skies = more stars. That might not be enough for a power­ful emotive argu­ment. Ima­gine you live some­where where the night sky is rub­bish. Redu­cing light pol­lu­tion isn’t such a big deal. It just means more rub­bish look­ing stars. I also won­der if heavy light pol­lu­tion, which is worst nearest the hori­zon, helps dis­tance people from the Cos­mos. Ban­ish­ing the vis­ible stars to the highest parts of the sky emphas­ise the sep­ar­a­tion between earthly life and the rest of the uni­verse. A dark sky shows that where you are is the place where the Earth meets the Sky. Below you soil, above only the unima­gin­able heights to the edge of the uni­verse, and you smack in the middle.

That feels dif­fer­ent and it’s some­thing you can’t repro­duce in a planetarium.

Photo: Orion by Eduardo Mar­iño. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC-SA licence.

As a coda, I remem­ber read­ing about the after­math of Hur­ricane Andrew in Astro­nomy magazine. After the power had been cut the night sky was exposed. People phoned up local uni­ver­sit­ies, plan­et­aria and obser­vat­or­ies to ask what the lights in the sky were. At the time I lived in the coun­try, so I found the idea that people could be puzzled by stars hil­ari­ous. Hav­ing lived in a city now, and know­ing that many people have never lived any­where else I have a lot more empathy. Ima­gine liv­ing through a hur­ricane and then, for the first time in your life, the uni­verse arrives on your door­step. No won­der you’d want to phone someone to check it’s normal.

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